nikk

DA: Wrong-Way Crash Driver Was Drunk


By FRANK ELTMAN
, AP
posted: 3 HOURS 3 MINUTES AGO
comments: 481
filed under: Crime News, National News

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GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (Aug. 4) - A Long Island mother was drunk and high on marijuana when she drove the wrong way for almost two miles on a highway before smashing head-on into an SUV, killing herself and seven others, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
The fiery July 26 crash on the Taconic Parkway killed the woman, her 2-year-old daughter, three young nieces and three men in the SUV. The woman's 5-year-old son survived. The occupants of a third vehicle sustained minor injuries.


Wrong-Way Crash
Diane Schuler was drunk on vodka and high on marijuana when she drove the wrong way onto a New York highway and slammed into an SUV, authorities said Tuesday. Schuler, 36, and seven other people were killed, including her 2-year-old daughter, Erin. Son Bryan, 5, was the sole survivor. Schuler's husband, Daniel, shown in this family photo, was not in the minivan.
Family Photo
Family Photo






A medical examiner found Diane Schuler's blood-alcohol level was 0.19, more than twice the state's legal limit of 0.08, Westchester County District Attorney Janet DiFiore said in a statement Tuesday.
State Police Maj. William Carey said a broken bottle of Absolut vodka was found near the wreck.
The autopsy also revealed that Schuler was impaired by marijuana, which she smoked no more than an hour before the wreck, investigators said.
State police have been investigating why the businesswoman, who was a regular visitor to an upstate New York campground, would have been driving toward her Long Island home the wrong way on a highway she reportedly had driven many times.

Investigators did not immediately comment on the prosecutor's report.
Schuler's husband, Daniel Schuler, told investigators that everything seemed fine when he and his wife left a Sullivan County campground at about 9:30 a.m. He went on a fishing trip while his wife headed home with the children.
Diane Schuler, 36, wound up going south in the northbound lanes as motorists sought in vain to get her attention. Six drivers called 911 before the collision, which happened about 35 miles northwest of New York City.
Witnesses reported seeing Schuler's red Ford minivan driving erratically, state police said Monday. They said the van was straddling two lanes, tailgating, flashing its headlights and beeping the horn.
Others saw the vehicle veering from one lane to another and one witness said it appeared as if she was attempting to pass him on the shoulder of the highway. Another witness said the van drove across a grass divider at a service area.
Schuler called her brother — the father of the three nieces who died — just after 1 p.m., saying she was feeling ill and may have been disoriented. The brother, Warren Hance, told her to stay put and he would come to meet her, but she apparently disregarded those instructions.



Floral Park village police blocked access to the Hance home and said no one was there to comment. There was no answer when a reporter knocked on the door of the Schuler family home in West Babylon.

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"But am I less holy, cause I choose to puff a blunt and drink a beer with my homies. Before we find world peace, we gotta find peace an end that war on the streets."

Sec

Horrible!

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Guidelines.
Search
http://www.marijuana.com/drug-test/index

-Lombax-

What a damn shame so many lives were lost and this just makes weed look bad....

xM1DN1GHT T0K3R

How did they know she was high on weed? I didn't think that a test that could prove that someone was currently high existed.

It is still obvious that this is completely related to the alcohol she had drinken, whats sad is that prohibitionists will try to use this as evidence against weed.

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Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

MrIMStoned

I wonder what the driver of the suv was looking at while the drunk chicks car was bearing down on him.

__________________
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"

nikk

"Is there really a car coming at me!?"
"No I must be crazy"
"Oh shit"

Ska

This pissed me off to the max when I saw it

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dedbr

I was on an interstate here in Ohio when a guy did the same thing. A bunch of us pulled off to the right and waited for him to pass. He was only going thirty miles per hour, but he could've been killed for sure if the Statie hadn't nailed his ass..........

It was really strange though seeing someone coming at me on an interstate. We had a school bus hit by some drunk fool about thirty years ago. Killed thirty some kids when the bus blew up. We have the record for the most fatalities in a single accident.

The guy that hit the bus was convicted and did 19 years in prison....... ...................That wreck was the begining of the changes in drunk driving laws all over the country. MADD started and more and more drunk drivers are going to prison.........

At least once a year we have a wreck like that. People are never going to stop drinking.......


Some Where In Ded Land..............

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"A PROHIBITION LAW STRIKES A BLOW,
AT THE VERY PRINCIPLES,
UPON WHICH OUR GOVERNMENT WAS FOUNDED....
PROHIBITION GOES BEYOND THE BOUNDS OF REASON,
IN THAT IT ATTEMPTS TO CONTROL A MANS APPETITE BY LEGISLATION,
AND MAKES CRIME OUT OF THINGS THAT ARE NOT CRIME." A. Lincoln
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WolfGang Paco

I doubt, if she was high, it did much to help this accident. I'm guessing the bottle of vodka did most, if not all, of the work.

Plus, how do they know she was high at the time?

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teyber

jesus christ. Someone should post this in the thread where the guy was talking about swerving in and out of cars when high.

Drunk driving is a horrible thing the fact that it kills innocent people..